C Programming Language 'Has Completed a Comeback' (infoworld.com)

InfoWorld reports that "the once-declining C language" has "completed a comeback" -- citing its rise to second place in the Tiobe Index of language popularity, the biggest rise of any language in 2017. An anonymous reader quotes their report: Although the language only grew 1.69 percentage points in its rating year over year in the January index, that was enough beat out runners-up Python (1.21 percent gain) and Erlang (0.98 percent gain). Just five months ago, C was at its lowest-ever rating, at 6.477 percent; this month, its rating is 11.07 percent, once again putting it in second place behind Java (14.215 percent) -- although Java dropped 3.05 percent compared to January 2017. C's revival is possibly being fueled by its popularity in manufacturing and industry, including the automotive market, Tiobe believes...

But promising languages such as Julia, Hack, Rust, and Kotlin were not able to reach the top 20 or even the top 30, Tiobe pointed out. "Becoming part of the top 10 or even the top 20 requires a large ecosystem of communities and evangelists including conferences," said Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director and compiler of the index. "This is not something that can be developed in one year's time."
For 2017 Tiobe also reports that after Java and C, the most popular programming languages were C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic .Net, R, PHP, and Perl.

The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index calculates that the most popular languages are Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, C#, C++, C, R, Objective-C, and Swift.

Comments

Re:programming practices

[angel'o'sphere]

My C career was relatively short.
Programming around 1986/1987 on Apple 2's in Aztec C (which was K&R C, with manuals only in english and I was not that good in english at that time, considering that the vocabulary was centered around computer terms, which we never had in school).
Took me nearly 2 month, probably longer, to realize that the C compiler does no real type checking at all and just compiled down what ever bollocks I had written. (It did not even have "prototypes", you annotated the types after the closing ")" of the function arguments and before the opening '{' of the function body, I have no idea (don't remember) if that was completely ignored or partly taken as a hint)
Then again I started to study CS in 1987 and got immediately a job at the university as half Unix Admin and half C programmer. I basically only wrote one majour C program at that time. A GUI in SUN's OpenView for a Prolog program.
Luckily that was a more advanced but still not ANSI C compiler (the sun compiler obviously, took still 4 or 5 years until most of the institutes switched to GNU C/C++).
Anyway, in school I learned Pascal, at the university I convinced my Tutor that I already can Pascal and that I want to do my assignments in Modula 2 (on Macs).
In private I switched immediately to C++ around 1989, realizing that C always only would be a "portable assembler" I avoided it where ever I could. Unfortunately again (besides Apple's C++ under MPW, the unix shell on Mac OS) I had to used a crippled version of C++ (no MI e.g.) called Think C, later bought by Symantec. Job wise I had shifted from "C programer" to unix admin, meanwhile.
Funnily I rarely ever met a C programmer that was significantly better in C than I was (I am) with my mediocre experience.

If we only had a C++ compiler compiling to the JVM, I probably would still only use C++. So I'm now stuck in the Java/Scala/Groovy corner :D
However the "programming model" in terms of H and Cpp files and linking etc. is quite archaic, and I prefer the concepts of Java, aka everything is a DLL, classpath, class loader real reflection over RTT ... but I miss true MI and true templates and true operator overloading.